What has stopped me from writing about the subject of the controversial legitimacy of Israel is that I know that many of my friends and readers support Israel and would likely be offended.

But I decided that, since my purpose in writing is to tell the truth as I see it and hopefully help others in seeing it too, and, in addition, since I believe that everything is interconnected and there are no important parts of the whole picture we can ignore without distorting our vision of other parts, I had to take this step, although not very easy or pleasant.

The comments and reactions have been a mixed bag of favourable and unfavourable, but many more of the former than I expected.

I suspect that many people have begun to realise that Israel is not the saint and victim in the Middle East conflict - and that Jews are not the saints and victims in the history of Europe either -, but are afraid to say so explicitly, because the "anti-Semitic" slander is much more powerful these days than the "Islamophobic" one.

This post is the first part of my answers.

Giuseppe Gigliotti wrote a very long comment on my Facebook profile page in which he seems to fuse his opinions on this and a previous article of mine, Israel Not Such a Haven for Christians. I doun't doubt his good faith, only some of his claims, which I'll examine quoting them as they are, mistakes and all. He says:

"Maybe, if among conservatives (included people that you love quoting, like Oriana Fallaci), there is support for the Jewish State, it is not because of a supposed lobbist pressure, but because of other reason."

I love Oriana Fallaci and I like quoting her because she's among the first who opened my eyes on Islam. This doesn't mean that she can make no mistake.

In one of her books, though, Oriana Fallaci says that Lebanon was the most beautiful and European country in the Middle East until it was invaded by the Palestinians, who did to it what the Jews had done to their lands. She spent many years in the Middle East as correspondent for the Italian newspaper Il Corriere della Sera. So she had seen many things first hand, including the displacement of Palestinians by Israel.

Why she supported Israel can be explained by her focus on opposing Islam, the same reason that applies to most of the counterjihad movement. If we have a common enemy, the general way of thinking goes, we must be friends or at least allies.

This is not a safe judgement, especially considering that the West would not even have the problem of the enemy, Islam, inside the gates if Jewish organisations, Leftist and politically correct in the diaspora as much as they are ethnonationalist when it comes to Israel, hadn't promoted mass immigration, multiculturalism and "tolerance" to Islam in Europe and America, where, supported by a Jewish-dominated media industry, academia, education system and Hollywood, they had a great influence in pushing - along with Cultural Marxism, one of their creations - policies that are greatly damaging the white, gentile, indigenous populations.

"Have you ever bothered to visit the country or to read about Zionism? It seems no."

I've read a lot about Zionism. I haven't visited Israel. I dispute the fact that you can understand a country's politics better if you've been there. In many cases it could even be counterproductive, for example if you go on one of those escorted tours to Israel for MPs and journalists organised by the Israel lobby during which you are presented only with the reality that they want you to see.

The following part, in which Giuseppe describes Israel as full of energy and mentions that he helps the local Christians there, is interesting but irrelevant to what I'm saying. Good for him to do that!

His next sentences puzzle me:

"So which is your point? You declare to be concerned about the fate of christians. Well, sorry but your concernes sound hollow to me. If you were moved by real angst, you wouldn't have quoted Younab. You know, a man on payroll of Abbas, that has nver condemned the muslim persecutions in Gaza or PA areas is not a source i will quote. But, it iz your own problem."

There is no quotation from "Younab" (or Younan, which is probably what Giuseppe meant) anywhere in those two articles under examination.

"Now let's pass to your scandalous theory about a supposed palestinian indigenousness. Even here, have you a vague idea of the jewish state law? It is meant to restate the obvious. Israel has always been the jewish people national home, without denying aocial or political rights to its minorities. That you, a woman who condemns multiculturalism , have objections only to the jewish selfdetermination sounds hilarious."

I am not objecting to Jewish self-determination, only to the method of stealing other peoples' lands used to achieve it. Palestinian indigenousness is not "scandalous", "a theory" or "supposed".

Even one of the heroes of Zionism (therefore yours), David Ben-Gurion, candidly admitted:

Everybody sees a difficulty in the question of relations between Arabs and Jews. But not everybody sees that there is no solution to this question. No solution! There is a gulf, and nothing can bridge it… We, as a nation, want this country to be ours; the Arabs, as a nation, want this country to be theirs.

In our political argument abroad, we minimize Arab opposition to us. But let us not ignore the truth among ourselves... But the fighting is only one aspect of the conflict which is in its essence a political one. And politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves. Militarily, it is we who are on the defensive who have the upper hand but in the political sphere they are superior. The land, the villages, the mountains, the roads are in their hands. The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country, while we are still outside.

The United Nations recognised Israel on December 11 1948 with Resolution 194, but Article 11 of the latter declares:

(The General Assembly) Resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible. [Emphases added]

So, Israel's recognition by the UN included that Israel let dispossessed Palestinians return (the “Right of Return”), which Israel hasn't done and for which the UN has issued various resolutions against Israel. I suppose the UN suffers from the universal disease of anti-Semitism.

"But, let's move to the next step. Where is the proof of the indigenousness of palestinians? You haven't quoted a single source, except that idiotic map. And, for your perusal, that images disprove your thesis. If you knew israeli history, something that you don't know, you would know that the borders of Palestinian Mandate were designated by britons. An indigenous people doesn't use a colonial map for defining its own homeland. And infact the Lehi was against this demarcation, since it was arbitrary. Yet, this indigenous people that you love so much uses an invented map... The truth is that until 30s there was no palestiniannation."

Giuseppe is contradicting himself, as by his own admission there was a Palestinian nation from the '30s, therefore before the birth of Israel.

Elsewhere, Giuseppe is confusing "nation" with "state".

To be a nation, a people doesn't have to be represented by a state. A good example is the Jewish people: before Israel, they didn't have a state, but Jewish nationalism existed, and that's what led to the establishment of the Jewish state.

From this initial confusion stem his misunderstandings about the maps: they don't portray country borders, they depict where Palestinians lived before dispossession and where they live now.

I doubt that Giuseppe has read my article under discussion, or that he has read it carefully, otherwise he wouldn't write that I don't "know that the borders of Palestinian Mandate were designated by britons", because I describe that situation there.

Proof of the indigenousness of Palestinians? There's plenty. I did cite a respected source, historian J.M. Roberts. I also quoted a Zionist source, Moshe Dayan, who said:

We came to this country which was already populated by Arabs, and we are establishing a Hebrew, that is a Jewish state here... Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages... There is no one place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.

Where's Giuseppe's proof that Palestinians were not indigenous to those lands?

Giuseppe' reference to the Lehi's opposition to my map's demarcation as arbitrary is a bit self-defeating.

The Lehi (aka Stern Gang) was a violent and terrorist Zionist group whose objective was to evict the British authorities from Palestine by force, to allow unrestricted immigration of Jews and the constitution of a Jewish state, a "new totalitarian Hebrew republic". Hardly a reputable source.

In the aftermath of World War II, Britain still played host to a number of groups sympathetic to Fascism and racial nationalism. These groups, together with the growing prominence of vocal politicians like Enoch Powell, alarmed the Jewish population. Of course, this was the same Jewish population which had repaid British war-time assistance by supporting, in every conceivable way, the Irgun terrorist campaign against the British in Palestine. One Jewish historian has remarked that Jews in Britain lavishly funded “the purchase of arms for Jewish underground armies fighting against British troops.”[1] Jewish terrorism against the British had culminated in 1947 with the kidnapping of two British army Intelligence Corps NCOs, Sergeant Clifford Martin and Sergeant Mervyn Paice. Martin and Paice were beaten and bloodied by their Jewish captors, before being hanged in a eucalyptus grove near Netanya. Their bodies were booby-trapped with mines, causing them to be torn to pieces when efforts were made to retrieve them. The brutal and sadistic slayings comprising the ‘Sergeant’s Affair’ had followed the bombing of Jerusalem’s King David Hotel (British headquarters in Palestine) a year earlier. The new atrocity sparked a wave of revulsion throughout Britain. More specifically, the actions caused the British people to re-think Jewish loyalty.

Wednesday, 28 January 2015

"Since Slovakia is a Christian country, we cannot tolerate an influx of 300,000-400,000 Muslim immigrants who would like to start building mosques all over our land and trying to change the nature, culture and values ​​of the state," said Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico.

Slovakia is the country that had its commemorative Euro coin depicting two Christian saints, Cyril and Methodius, at first rejected by the European Commission, which told Bratislava it would need to re-design the coins and remove Christian symbols, including halos and a cross-adorned stole. Eventually the Slovakia Euro was issued with halos and crosses.

This is the umpteenth demonstration of an obvious historical and contemporary fact: the stronger a country's attachment to its Christian heritage, the more robust, intelligent and informed its fight against Islam, as Mr Fico's strategy well exemplifies.

The PM noted that some countries are passing special laws to combat Islamic terrorism that give more leeway to the police. But, he said, "the best way to deal with that threat would be to have different rules for 'certain groups' when it comes to privacy, phones or bank accounts."

"When it comes to fighting Islamic terrorism, countries should pass laws that allow the police to do surveillance on people who are considered a potential threat to the country."

It's unnecessary to restrict the freedom of citizens by taking potshots at everyone, we should restrict only that of a small group at risk that threatens us: Muslims. Difficult to deny that the Slovak Prime Minister's is a logical and more effective strategy.

"Most of the people in these groups are foreign-born" he continued, "but there may also be people who are citizens of our country acting in such a way as to raise suspicions that in the future they could do something harmful to the country, as we have seen in Western Europe, and we must be prepared."

Fico agree swith Miroslav Lajčák, the Slovak Foreign Minister, that "the project of multiculturalism has failed."

Where has all the Christian-Muslim interfaith dialogue gone? Or maybe it has just been a monologue, with only the Christians doing the talking and no-one on the other side listening?

That this is the case has been dramatically brought home by yesterday's events in Pakistan, where, amid countrywide protests and demonstrations, hundreds of Muslim students protesting against Charlie Hebdo's cartoons stormed a Christian high school for boys in the city of Bannu, in the country's northwest, and demanded its closure.

Four students were injured. According to witnesses, the protesters opened its gates, entered the school and vandalised it, destroying objects and windows. Some of them were carrying guns.

Last month 150 people, mostly students, were killed when Taliban gunmen attacked an army-run school in the provincial capital Peshawar. Charlie Hebdo caricatures have triggered massive protests in Pakistan. On January 16, at least three people were injured when protesters and police clashed at an anti-Charlie Hebdo stir outside the French consulate in Karachi.

Tuesday, 27 January 2015

Some positive effects of the Charlie Hebdo atrocities are felt in Italy, with crackdown on the cult of Islam.

First Massimo Bitonci, the mayor of the city of Padua, in the region of Venice (Veneto), Northern Italy, simply and clearly said: "No more mosques in Padua. The city council will not grant any more public space for the building of mosques and Islamic places of worship."

Padua's councillor Marina Buffoni sent the city's police to Muslim meeting places, to confiscate posters and images of women in burqa. She said: "These posters showed women completely covered by a burqa, you could only see their eyes. It's unacceptable for an organisation to display such images, in defiance of principles of true integration, especially regarding the status of women. True integration doesn't just mean respect of Italian law, but also of the customs of our tradition. The burqa is a symbol of slavery and subjugation of women and will never be welcome in the city of Padua."

And now, the Lombardy Region, Italy's richest and most populated, whose main city is Milan, has today approved an "anti-mosque law".

The restrictive amendments to the Law N. 12, Urban Planning for Places of Religious Worship, received 43 votes in favour (among which those of the Northern League) and 26 against (from the Left and Beppe Grillo's Five Star Movement).

The new buildings must blend in with the local landscape architecturally and in size: therefore, no minarets.

Other requirements include the installation of CCTVs directly linked with the police, the presence of appropriate link roads and primary urban infrastructure, parking areas at least twice the size of the floor area of the worship building and, above all, "appropriate distances from other, existing places of worship". Given the vast presence of churches in Italy, the proliferation of mosques will be difficult.

A Danish man living in Vienna was sentenced to two years in prison for having compared Islam's prophet Muhammad to a pig on Facebook posts. The 32 year-old, according to a report by the Austrian Press Agency (APA), was sentenced by Judge George Olschak, who called it "a deeply offensive insult to Islam" and "illegal incitement to religious hatred."

The even stricter state prosecutor, Stefanie Schön, said that the sentence "is too lenient" and she would appeal "for a longer period of detention."

The trial is the result of investigations by a fanatic self-described "anti-fascist", Uwe Seiler, who is busy reporting what he considers far-Right propaganda and neo-Nazi rhetoric on the Internet to the police.

The Danish man, who in spite of everything hasn't lost his sense of humor, pointed out that he wrote most of the online messages in his own language, saying: "If I wanted to talk to an Austrian public, I would write in Turkish. Of course, in the past I would have used German."

The BBC was called "mad" after one of its top executives, the head of BBC Arabic Tarik Kafala, said that the Charlie Hebdo killers should not be described as "terrorists".

Mr Kafala, whose BBC Arabic television, radio and online news services - the largest of the BBC’s non-English language news services - reach a weekly audience of 36 million people, explained: “We try to avoid describing anyone as a terrorist or an act as being terrorist. What we try to do is to say that ‘two men killed 12 people in an attack on the office of a satirical magazine’. That’s enough, we know what that means and what it is.”

The BBC, whose own guidance also states that the word "terrorist" is considered "a barrier", backed his comments but faced a storm of criticism from peers and MPs over its "outrageous" decision to not use the term.

In line with its editorial guidelines, the BBC coverage of the Paris attacks in which 17 people were murdered, as well as that of last month's Taliban school massacre in Peshawar, Pakistan, carefully avoided using the expression "terrorist", except when quoting other people's words.

BBC TV, radio and online reports described the murderers as "militants" or "gunmen" instead.

Mr Kafala added: “Terrorism is such a loaded word. The UN has been struggling for more than a decade to define the word and they can’t. It is very difficult to. We know what political violence is, we know what murder, bombings and shootings are and we describe them. That’s much more revealing, we believe, than using a word like 'terrorist' which people will see as value-laden.”

And for Mr Kafala, I suppose, if "terrorist" should be avoided for being too little revealing, "Muslim" must be avoided for being too revealing.

Here is a thought experiment: Suppose that while the demonstrators stood solemnly at Place de la Republique the other night,… a man stepped out in front… carrying a placard with a cartoon depicting the editor of the magazine lying in a pool of blood, saying, “Well I’ll be a son of a gun!” or “You’ve really blown me away!” or some such witticism. How would the crowd have reacted? Would they have laughed?... He would have been lucky to get away with his life.

Masses of people have turned the victims of a horrific assassination… into heroes of France and free speech. The point of the thought experiment is not to show that such people are hypocrites. Rather, it is to suggest that they don’t know their own minds. They see themselves as committed to the proposition that there are no limits to freedom of expression... But they too have their limits. They just don’t know it.

Perhaps because he’s a philosopher and by profession he's obliged to analyse the logical consistency and theoretical validity of statements, Brian Klug here encapsulates the problem with the default mainstream "Je Suis Charlie" position.

There is no such thing as absolute freedom of speech.

Even those who sincerely believe that they uphold this principle often don't realise they wouldn’t be prepared to accept any word expressed in any circumstance.

Similarly, philosophers like Karl Popper maintain that in any debate you cannot question everything. The debaters must share some common assumptions, including the use of the same language and basic definitions of at least some of the main concepts relevant to the discussion.

This corresponds to relativity in the physical world. To establish if and at what speed a train is moving, you need something still to compare it with.

This is one of the fallacies often propounded by the so-called "New Atheists" like Richard Dawkins: question everything.

The prevailing ideology of relativism, wedded to the policy of multiculturalism, does something similar to questioning everything, by denying the idea that some doctrines are better than others and rejecting a shared set of belief as a sine qua non for a society.

By believing in everything we believe in nothing. Hence the current confusion about freedom of speech and in particular the failure to recognise exactly when this good is paid for too dearly at the expense of society.

Therefore the discussion shouldn’t be around yes or no to free speech but about what should limit free speech and why.

The best way to do that is to establish the principles and goals to guide our decision about what expressions shouldn’t be permitted by law as their effects are so deleterious that they outweigh the benefits of free speech.

The most cited examples of such expressions are falsely shouting "Fire!" in a crowded place and incitements to commit crime.

But, beyond obvious cases like these, we can immediately see that we cannot reach a consensus, since people in our fractured society have widely-different goals and principles.

Much of this diversity in the West is produced by the influx of large masses of people from countries with worldviews, religious doctrines, ways of life profoundly diverging from ours.

The Hebdo attack tragically revealed one such irreducible conflict of ideas that makes it impossible for Westerners and devout Muslims to agree on when free expression should be limited.

Not even Charlie Hebdo (henceforth CH), the much-trumpeted supreme paragon and defender to the death of free speech, believed in absolute freedom of speech, as demonstrated by its sacking of the cartoonist Siné for a column considered anti-Jewish but, compared to the rag's ordinary fare, too mild for words. Later Siné won a 40,000-euro court judgment against CH for wrongful termination.

CH wasn’t the paper of free speech, but of double standards.

Recently the rag’s long-standing lawyer Richard Malka made evident his opinion that people can be too free in their speech when he chastisedNouvel Obs magazine for publishing a criticism of CH’s slain editor “Charb” by its co-founder Henri Roussel.

I don’t consider Charb et al martyrs. You can be a martyr to a cause, but when your cause is nothing (that’s what nihilism, in the end, is), you can’t be one.

Neither is their paper “satirical”: satire must express something more than the mere immature desire to attack and destroy.

According to encyclopaedias and dictionaries, satire has the intention to shame into improvement; its purpose is constructive social criticism, ridiculing stupidity or vices, showing the weaknesses or bad qualities of a person, government, society, etc.

There is no attempt at improving anything in CH’s crude depiction of sodomy among the three Persons of the Holy Trinity, no constructive social criticism in its celebration of Christmas with a cartoon of Baby Jesus thrown in a public squat toilet between a loo-paper roll (Mary) and a toilet brush (Joseph). No stupidity or vices are exposed – as opposed to demonstrated - by the drawing of the Virgin Mary making the vulgar “umbrella gesture” to fleeing Iraqi Christians while shouting the same words uttered during the massacre in which its drawer, Riss, was wounded, in an eerie coincidence: "Allahu Akbar". No weaknesses or bad qualities are shown by the sketch of a dishevelled, desperate Madonna who, dripping liquid, says she was raped by the three Wise Men.

CH’s crass, adolescent humour revolving around sex (preferably of the homosexual variety) and excrements is unfunny and sad. It reminds me of a song by 1960s-70s Italian singer-songwriter Fabrizio De Andre’, about Charles Martel returning from the Battle of Poitiers after having defeated the Moors. The supposed humour concerns his long abstinence from sex imposed by the war, ending in his encounter with a prostitute.

De Andre’, like CH, was a product of the ’68 culture with its visceral hatred for anything Christian. Neither is satire: no intelligent message is put across, it’s turpitude and vile defamation just for the sake of it. In a word: destructive. Which is what the counterculture is all about.

Here we get to answer the question regarding the core principles and goals that must be protected from attacks, the line that freedom of speech must not cross. Charles Martel is a symbol of a Europe united by the same belief in Christianity and prepared to defend that belief on which its civilisation was founded and without which, as it is under everyone’s eyes now, is sinking.

Christianity must be protected from its enemies, then as now. It’s not a question of preferential taste or personal desire: it’s the collective cohesion that is at stake, without which there is no Western society. Critically, given the decline of Christianity as a unifying force among Europeans, statements about the legitimacy of the interests of White Europeans in retaining their territories and their culture must be protected rather than marginalised or made illegal as “hate speech.”

It’s, at this point, a question of survival. Freedom of speech is not a suicide pact, as Alexander Boot put it.

That our heroes and the symbol of our fight for freedom must be the demented pornographers of CH shows what sorry state our civilisation has reached.

That revolting excuse of a rag has been a procession of covers offending Christianity, at a moment when like never before we need something to believe in and to rally around.

It's because of people like CH and De Andre’ and their successful propagation of desecrations of what had kept us together and strong for centuries, that we have been left with absolutely nothing to fight Islam with.

By disarming us, the CH journalists victims of the recent attacks have indeed invited their own death - in a deeper sense than is commonly thought.

Friday, 23 January 2015

The debate currently taking place in Israel on a controversial bill for a Basic Law declaring Israel to be a "Jewish state", which is seen as compromising equality by differentiating between Jewish and non-Jewish citizens and considered as one of the most divisive laws in the country's 67-year history, makes it particularly important to take a position on the issue of this unique nation.

I have to say that my opinion of the Arab–Israeli conflict has oscillated a few times over the years. It is a complex situation, or rather it may appear so due to the difficulty of finding non-partisan accounts.

When I joined the counterjihad movement a few years ago, my views became heavily influenced by the pro-Israel element that dominates it.

But my doubts have never completely gone away, and now things are much clearer to me.

I am in good company. Among those who, like me, over time shifted their opinions about Zionism and eventually took a negative view of Israel is one of the world's most famoust and respected Jews: Albert Einstein, “the world’s first international media star”.

The book collects Einstein’s letters, essays, interviews, speeches and thoughts about Zionism and Israel from 1919 until his death in 1955, and includes this testimony to the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine in January 1946:

Judge Hutcheson: It has been told to our committee by the Zionists that the passionate heart of every Jew will never be satisfied until they have a Jewish state in Palestine. It is contended, I suppose, that they must have a majority over the Arabs. It has been told to us by the Arab representatives that the Arabs are not going to permit such condition as that, they they will not permit having themselves converted from a majority to a minority.

Dr. Einstein: Yes. [Emphases added]

This is what we, as Europeans and more generally whites, don't want either: to have a minority immigrating to our countries who wants to replace us as a majority and take over.

With what consistency, then, can we take the side of the Jews doing the same thing to Christian and Muslim Palestinians? Being anti-Islam shouldn't blind us to injustice just because it's done to Muslims (and not even only to them in this case).

The testimony goes on:

Judge Hutcheson: I have asked these various persons if it is essential to the right or the privilege of the Jews to go to Palestine, if it is essential to real Zionism that a setup be fixed so that the Jews have a Jewish state and a Jewish majority without regard to the Arab view. Do you share that point of view, or do you think the matter can be handled on any other basis?

Dr. Einstein: Yes, absolutely. The state idea is not according to my heart. I cannot understand why it is needed. It is connected with many difficulties and a narrow-mindedness. I believe it is bad.

Judge Hutcheson: Isn’t it spiritual and ethical – I do not mean this particular Zionist movement, I do not mean the idea of insisting that a Jewish state must be created – isn’t it anachronistic?

Dr. Einstein: In my opinion, yes. I am against it . . .

Adam Horowitz on Mondoweiss explains that Einstein opposed partition and supported a bi-national state that would ensure equal rights for Palestinians and Jews.

Many in the Jewish community responded to Einstein with letters of protest and anguish, including expressions of "a certain horror and sincere doubt as to your mental processes.”

Horowitz maintains that there has never been consensus within the Jewish community on Zionism or Israel, but an intense debate.

The best evidence that the intention to dispossess and displace Palestinians has been there all along from the beginning is in the words of Zionist and Israeli leaders:

Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, wrote: “We shall have to spirit the penniless population (the Arabs) across the border … while denying it any employment in our own country.”

Chaim Weizmann, the first president of Israel, said: “Palestine is to become as Jewish as England is English.”

David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, wrote: “I favor partition because when we become a strong power we will abolish partition and spread throughout Palestine.”

He also said: “Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves … we are the aggressors and they defend themselves”; and wrote this: “If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural, we have taken their country.”

Also, in a letter to his son: “We will expel the Arabs and take their place.”

Moshe Sharett, Israel’s first foreign minister and second prime minister, is quoted in “Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict” as saying: “We have forgotten that we have not come to an empty land to inherit it, but we have come to conquer a country from people inhabiting it.”

Moshe Dayan, Israeli Defense Forces chief of staff and later defense minister, was a straight talker: “There is not one single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.”

Richman and Grossman tell us that in 1967, “the Arab world threatened Israel with destruction.” Here’s what then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin said in 1982: “In June 1967, we had a choice. The Egyptian army concentration in the Sinai approaches did not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.”

The Arabs did not initiate the war, Israel did.

The interpretation of the Middle East conflict as caused by Muslim supremacism doesn't seem to hold water.

The main events of the origin of Israel, as described for example by J.M. Roberts' The History of the World (Amazon USA)(Amazon UK) and other sources, are these. At the time of the British government's Balfour Declaration (2 November 1917, named after the British Foreign Secretary A.J. Balfour), 600,000 Arabs and 60,000-80,000 Jews lived in Palestine.

The Balfour Declaration, enshrined in a League of Nations mandate in 1920, said that a "national home for the Jewish people" would be founded in Palestine, while respecting and preserving "the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine".

Neither Britain, which then had a Mandate for Palestine, nor anyone else later could reconcile the conflicting principles.

The situation was precipitated when, soon after the end of World War II in 1945, the World Zionist Congress demanded that one million Jews be admitted to Palestine at once.

The United States had a major role by turning pro-Zionist, a necessity dictated by the 1946 mid-term congressional elections in which Jewish votes were important.

The British decided to withdraw and, on the very day they did, 14 May 1948, the state of Israel was proclaimed.

The justification for this act of dispossession was and is in the predominant historiography of the Holocaust. This is the reason why doubting the latter's orthodox account is in many countries an imprisonable offence. The first instigators of "hate crimes" and "hate laws" in Western societies have not been the Muslims, but the Jews.

Wednesday, 21 January 2015

I disagree.Nationalism does not cause wars.Money and power cause wars.Those who profit from wars cause wars.Manipulate and blackmail the traitor politicians into wars.

Every war has generally many causes, but it's impossible to deny the evident historical truth that nationalism has been a predominant cause of war.

Right now I'm reading respected historian JM Roberts' History of the World where he describes events in the 1930s' Middle East:

Unfortunately, the Syrian situation soon also showed the disintegrating power of nationalism when the Kurdish people of north Syria revolted against the prospect of submergence in an Arab state.

This Kurdish example also shows that war is not necessarily to be considered as a negative occurrence, as Diane Granger seems to imply judging from the tone of her comment.

National wars, as well as religious wars, might sometimes have been justified.

But we are not entitled to our own facts, only to our own opinions. Among other obvious examples of factors provoking violent conflicts are Jewish and Arab nationalisms.

And Italian nationalism generated many wars of independence in the 19th century.

Besides, nationalism is not a preserve of "the people". What Diane lists, "Money and power ...Those who profit from wars... traitor politicians" may also have nationalist motivations.

One of the main causes of the First World War (if not the main) was Britain, then the greatest world power, not seeing favourably the economic and military ascent of Germany threatening the "sceptred isle"'s top position. That is nationalism too.

Just because one is attracted to nationalism shouldn't make one blind to reality.

Nationalism is and has been both good and bad, justified and excessive, opening people's eyes and sometimes closing them.

Tuesday, 20 January 2015

It's a common, but misconceived, idea that Western people have grown disillusioned with religion because of religious wars in the distant or - in the almost unique case of Northern Ireland - recent past.

People on the Left have taken this view with a bit more consistency than those on the Right.

Think of John Lennon's song Imagine. He saw world peace and unification in the abolition of what he considered as all causes of division and conflict: religion, class, nation.

Lennon was, to put it in euphemistically-correct language, "cognitively challenged", but at least one can't deny his consistency and even-handedness in spreading the blame for war potential among different causative factors.

On the Right, instead, we have activists who condemn religion for provoking wars while at the same time strenuously supporting the value of nationhood.

Let's look at this as scientifically and empirically as we can.

Vast numbers of people have been killed in wars fought along class lines or for socialism, or proclaimed as such, and in their aftermaths: French Revolution, Russian Revolution, China, the spread of communism to Eastern Europe, Spanish Civil War, Vietnam, and these are only the main ones. Lennon's idea of the pacifying effect of the abolition of classes was not very far-sighted.

Many have also been killed in self-declared national wars: European wars, American Revolution, the Two World Wars, wars against colonial powers and so on.

And many have been killed in Christian religious wars; in fact there is an overlapping of several national and religious wars in Europe.

The reasons why I limit myself to Christianity are two: it's always been the religion of the West, and - not coincidentally - it's the only religion that can survive rational examination.

Writers like the New Atheists have had some influence in setting the current debate in terms of simply "religion", as if we could treat all religions in the same way.

But think if we did that with science.

After all, science includes many different theories. Some of them, like Ptolemy's geocentrism postulating the earth at the centre of the universe, have now been rejected. And yet Ptolemaic astronomy is a scientific theory, both in the historic sense that it was for centuries accepted by the scientific community, and because it used the best scientific methodology available at the time.

In the same way as, when we talk about science, we make distinctions between theories - invalid ones like geocentrism or Copernicus' circular orbits and currently valid ones like relativity and quantum physics -, so we should do when the subject is religion and distinguish among greatly different doctrines.

Religions other than Christianity are primitive and constraining: Judaism with its excessive, indeed obsessive, emphasis on a great number of laws and rituals; Islam ordering the slaughter of all infidels to establish a utopian paradise on earth; Hinduism with its plethora of deities representing contradictory values; Buddhism with its withdrawal from the world.

Christianity has represented an immense liberation and step forward for mankind.

I am not saying that attachment to one's nation is a bad thing; far from it. I think that - if it doesn't trascend into fanaticism - is a value to cherish.

Many good things can become bad if fanatically supported. That is true of defence of nationalism as well as blind defence of science of the kind that Richard Dawkins has accustomed us to.

I just question the consistency of someone who adduces religious wars as the reason to reject Christianity but doesn't consider national wars as a reason to reject nationalism, despite the fact that violence and massacres were caused by both.

Indeed, the first century after the triumph of "secularism", the 20th century, has seen some of the bloodiest conflicts and genocidal wars in history.

The reality is that the progressive abandonment of Christianity in its home, the West, in particular in Europe, has not been caused by a reaction to religious wars. It has not been a spontaneous process in the consciences of native people, but the effect of instigation and propaganda by few, by elites with their own ideological agendas and alien interests, often damaging to the indigenous population: communists, atheists and ethnic elites, frequently the same people.

Thursday, 15 January 2015

It has been the Christian cross and Christian Church that has defeated the invading Islamic armies again and again, throughout the history of Europe, let's never forget that.

Now Europe is losing Christianity, and is losing to Islam: can that be only a coincidence?

Wake up, people! The attacks on Christianity have come from various sources, but none of these sources have had European interests at heart. Sometimes these attacks are repeated by naïve, unaware, possibly well-meaning "useful idiots", but mostly they are conceived and put into effect by those organised groups and elites who have a purpose: breaking up indigenous European coherence and resistance, by depriving us of the core set of principles and values what has kept us united for millennia.

Yes, united even after the Reformation. Protestants and Catholics have fought, but so have English against French, British against Germans, French against Prussians, Florentines against the Sienese, Pisans against the Lucchese, Scots against English, Dutch against Portuguese, English against Spaniards, Italians against Austrians, Russians against Swedes, Poles and Lithuanians against Russians and Swedes, and more European nations against European nations.

In the Thirty Years War (1618–1648), one of the longest and most destructive conflicts in European history, Catholic and Protestant countries on one side fought against other Catholic and Protestant countries on the opposite side.

Our divisions along national lines haven't stopped us from feeling all Europeans and part of the great, glorious Western civilisation; exactly the same can be said about our divisions along religious lines - provided that they relate only to different confessions within Christianity, to which all we Westerners historically and genuinely belong.

The total disaster of multiculturalism has demonstrated that a society cannot survive without a shared central belief.

Do we really want to risk the end of the West, the most beautiful human creation the world has ever seen? And for what? Because we have been subjugated by alien anti-Christian propaganda? Without rebellion, without a fight?

This is based on just empirical truth: if we want to defeat Islam, what else can we resurrect if not the spirit of the Crusades?

Tuesday, 13 January 2015

In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo tragedy, more than ever politicians, media and elites reiterate that only a small (indeed, tiny) minority of Muslims commit acts like the recent Paris attacks.

First of all, we must observe that this is not a statement of fact, but rather an expression of hope.

For we don't know the number or percentage of would-be terrorists that the Muslim population in each Western country harbours.

Because to know how many they are would also mean knowing who they are - all of them -, in which case we would have solved the terrorist problem with closer surveillance or, much better, expulsion.

So, almost by definition, we haven't got the faintest idea of their number.

We can't even rely on the figure of aggressions actually carried out as a good indicator, because this is only a fraction of the total of terror attacks planned, most of which have been foiled by police and secret services: many of these we haven't even got to hear about. And the total number of planned offensives, prevented or executed, doesn't offer predictions about future ones in such uncertain circumstances.

What we do know is that in severalcountries Muslim immigrant populations tend to get more radicalised with each successive generation, so the threat is going to increase. This can explain the by-now thousands of jihadists travelling from Europe to fight in Syria and Iraq and often returning to Europe with terrorist training and intentions.

If what happens in the rest of the world, where Islamism and its violence are on the rise, is an indication for the West, the prospects are not happy.

But, even if the number of terrorists were indeed a tiny minority of the West's Muslims, this wouldn't alter the fact that there is a question to be answered: why? Why take the risk? Why deliberately expose innocent Westerners to the threat of being massacred?

We know - nobody disputes it - that Muslims periodically take up guns, explosives, airplanes or what have you to terrorise and slaughter people in buildings, cafes, trains, buses and stores in various Western countries.

We also know that no other group approaches the same level of public, direct physical menace.

Why shouldn't Western nations remove this unnecessary peril?

We can't even say that Muslims belong in Europe, that they have a traditional or cultural foothold on European soil. In fact, they have been our enemy throughout their history. Even Spain and Sicily were invaded and conquered by Muslims, but didn't welcome them.

I know I’m stating the obvious here, but, from the way the talking heads and pundits speak and write, it appears that it needs to be stated.

Something else that public figures are pleased to repeat is that most Muslims condemn this act. In reality, there is no evidence for that either. I haven’t heard of any Muslim demonstration against it. 82% of French people think that Muslims are showing no condemnation of terrorism in France.

One fact of life we’ve learned by induction is that shouting ”Allahu Akbar” is a sure sign that every deed accompanying or following this utterance is of non-Islamic nature, as every time this sequence occurs we are guaranteed that the action is not just non-Islamic but – more strongly - un-Islamic. Such an episode occurred just before Christmas, still in France, when a man ploughed his white van into a Christmas market crowd in Nantes screaming ”Allahu Akbar”, injuring dozens of people - the third incident of its kind in the country in a few days. The man was correctly not described in the newspaper report as Muslim. He might have been anything.

So, is there a benefit - it must be very, very secret as nobody has ever heard of it - that Muslims bring to our lands that compensates for and outweighs the recurring nightmares that they produce and could be even more tragic and numerous if it were not for the enormous expenditure on police and intelligence resources deployed to keep their threat at bay, public-purse money that our over-indebted countries cannot afford?

Not only there is no such benefit. There are indeed additional burdens. Mostly these are not typical of Muslims only, but of general Third-World and mass immigrants. Indeed the problem of the former and the latter are related and difficult to separate. But, since Muslims represent a more specific threat to life and limb than other immigrant groups and there is widespread acceptance of Islam specifically as a negative presence in Europe, this could be a good starting point to tackle the seemingly-intractable immigration question.

A UK 2012 poll found that Britons are far more strongly opposed to immigration, particularly from Muslim countries, than they have been at any time in recent memory. An October 2014 survey showed that three out of four Londoners (74%) think that Britons who have travelled to Syria or Iraq to fight with extremist groups should be banned from returning to the UK.
Here are some issues:

Economic. In Britain and other countries it has been calculated that Muslims and other immigrants from the Third World, who are disproportionately unemployed in comparison to the rest of the population and have much larger families, cost far more revenue in public services and social welfare than they put in.

What is preached by UK-based Muslim cleric Anjem Choudary is that benefits from the infidel state are a form of jizya, the tax that only non-Muslims have to pay as dhimmis, the condition of submission they are forced to live in under Islamic rule.

In Denmark, “Muslims make up 5% of the population but receive 40% of social-welfare outlays.”

In Germany, foreign nationals are consistently overrepresented in unemployment figures, with Turks being in the worst situation, with an unemployment rate of 23% and comprising one third of all unemployed foreigners.

Muslim immigrants in Germany up until 2007, Dr Ulfkotte explains, "have taken 1 billion euros more out of our social welfare system than they have paid into our system". To give a better idea of the magnitude of this figure and put it into perspective, he adds that the total debt of the German government is 1.7 billion euros. Expelling Muslims, therefore, will help Europe fight its financial crisis.

In Sweden, a 15.1% immigrant population burden 60.5% of the entire nations welfare costs.

This differential, indeed opposite, effect of European versus non-European immigration on British economy makes Nigel Farage, leader of the fast-rising populist, anti-EU and anti-immigration party UKIP, sound absurd when he concentrates his efforts on stopping Bulgarian and Romanian immigration instead of the much more ruinous Asian and African invasion. But obviously he doesn’t want to be called racist..

Social. Muslims, like other immigrants, make the competition for limited resources - hospitals, doctor surgeries, school places, housing, jobs - much harder for the local Whites..

Law and order. Muslims, as well as other Third-World immigrants, are also overrepresented in other-than-terror crime statistics, from those particularly peculiar to them, like honour killings, sex-slavery paedophile rings and female genital mutilation, to more general ones including rioting, looting, wife beating and rape.

Yet for our leaders and commentators the possibility of a Muslim-free Europe is not even a remotely conceivable possibility. Listening to them is a surreal experience: they talk as if Muslim presence in our countries were an ineluctable fact of life, like death and taxes, and not a deliberate choice of corrupt politicians and self-serving elites.

They make you feel as if Muslims had profound roots on our soil and were part and parcel of Western civilisation, both of which are as far from the truth as they can be.

Maintaining the Islamic presence here is for them the Kantian categorical imperative, nay it's more than that: it's a religious commandment. "Thou shalt welcome, feed, house and accept to be killed by Muslims, and never reject or deport them en masse."

Whereas the sensible solution would be to stop Muslims from taking up residence here and expel those who have already done so.

In fact, credit should be given to ‘Amru Adib, a very popular Egyptian TV show host, for this remark he made after the Charlie Hebdo attack:

He asked pious Muslims who cannot tolerate a word against Islam, “So why are you, of your own free will, moving to these godless nations[the West] in the first place.”

During the same show he pointed out that, to many Muslims, the fact that the Egyptian president Sisi entered a Christian church on the eve of January 7, the Coptic Christmas, demonstrates that he must be an infidel. The Salafi party immediately said: "We will never congratulate the Christians on their festivals. What’re you crazy?!". Adib answered these many Muslims by saying:

Okay, I get it, you hate Christians. But can you please be consistent? Why do you cooperate with them in other regards? Why do you go to their nations [reference to the West]? Why do you go to their doctors? Please, let your hate be consistent.”

I have no doubt that 3/4 of those hearing me are cursing me now — saying “he’s an infidel, an apostate!”…

In short, our situation is not very far from collective madness, although I can spot a few signs that greater numbers of people, at every new atrocity, find it increasingly difficult to believe in the TV and newspapers interpretations more than in what their own eyes and ears tell them.

Saturday, 10 January 2015

These are some of the things that Oriana Fallaci wrote after 9/11. So little has changed that she could have written them now, after the Paris attacks, which also confirm how right she was.

~~~~~~~

The enemy is in our home

The canard of "moderate" Islam, the comedy of tolerance, the lie of the integration, the farce of multiculturalism continue. And with that, the attempt to make us believe that the enemy consists of a small minority and that small minority lives in distant countries. Well, the enemy is not a small minority. And he's in our home. He's an enemy that at first glance does not look like an enemy. Without a beard, dressed in Western fashion, and according to his accomplices in good or bad faith perfectly-assimilated-into-our-social-system. That is, with a residence permit. With the car. With family. Never mind if the family is often made up of two or three wives, never mind if the wife or wives are constantly beaten up, if he sometimes kills his blue-jeans-wearing daughter, if sometimes his son rapes the 15-year-old Bolognese girl walking in the park with her boyfriend. He is an enemy that we treat as a friend. Who nevertheless hates and despise us with intensity. An enemy whom in the name of humanitarianism and political asylum we welcome in thousands at a time, even though the reception centres are overflowing, bursting, and we no longer know where to put him. An enemy whom, in the name of "necessity" (but what necessity, the necessity to fill our streets with peddlers and drug dealers?), we invite through the Olympus of the Constitution. "Come, dear, come. We need you so much." An enemy who turns mosques into barracks, training camps, recruitment centres for terrorists, and who blindly obeys the imam. An enemy who, thanks to the free movement required by the Schengen Agreement, roams at will across Eurabia, so that to go from London to Marseille, from Cologne to Milan or vice versa he doesn't have to produce any documents. He can be a terrorist who moves around to organise or put into effect a massacre, he can carry all the explosives he wants: no one stops him, no one touches him.

The crucifix will disappear

An enemy who, right after settling in our cities or countryside, engages in bullying and demands free or semi-free housing as well as the right to vote and citizenship. All of which he gets easily. An enemy who imposes his own rules and customs on us. Who attacks the teacher or the principal because a polite schoolgirl kindly offered to her Muslim classmate a rice pancake with Marsala, namely "with a liqueur". And-careful-not-to-repeat-the-insult. An enemy who from kindergartens wants to ban - indeed bans - Nativity scenes and Father Christmas. Who removes the crucifix from the classrooms, throws it out of the windows of hospitals, and defines it as "a naked little corpse put there to scare Muslim children". An enemy who in Britain stuffs his shoes with explosives in order to blow up the Paris-Miami jumbo flight. An enemy who in Amsterdam kills Theo van Gogh, guilty of making documentaries about the slavery of Muslim women, and after killing him opens his belly and sticks into it a letter with the death sentence of his best friend. The enemy, finally, for whom you will always find a lenient magistrate, ready to release him from prison. And whom Eurobean governments (note: this is not a typo, I just mean Eurobean, not European) don't expel even if he is illegal.

Wednesday, 7 January 2015

Giorgio Nadali, a religion teacher in Milan who had taught for 26 years, published 9 books and contributed to several magazines, has been suspended from teaching the Catholic religion.

His “crime” was to show his secondary school students the famous 30-minute documentary The Silent Scream (whose video is above) in Italian.

The film was made in 1984 in the USA, narrated by obstetrician and gynecologist Bernard Nathanson, MD. It illustrates the abortion process via ultrasound and portrays an abortion taking place in the uterus.

It's a vivid representation of a voluntary termination of pregnancy from the viewpoint of the victim, for a change.

Dr Nathanson introduces the short ultrasound video by explaining that foetology, a medical discipline that has existed only for the last few decades, has helped to better understand the complexity of the human foetus.

No claim is made in the film about the foetus' capability to feel pain, which is still largely unknown. From Wikipedia:

The hypothesis that human fetuses are capable of perceiving pain in the early stages of a pregnancy has not received sufficient evidence to be proven or disproven; the developmental stage of research and instrumentation is so far insufficient to this task.

Some authors,[3] however, argue that fetal pain is possible from the second half, or even the second tremester,[4] of pregnancy.

Dr Nathanson also shows how the number of abortions per year in the United States dramatically increased from 100,000 in 1963 when abortion was still illegal, to 750,000 in 1973 when legalisation through the Roe v Wade decision was introduced, to 1,500,000 in 1983, the last year for which figures were available when the film was made. He recounts that an abortionist doctor and a radical pro-abortion feminist involved in the editing of the documentary were so shocked by it that they stopped their respective involvement in abortion.

This observation has an autobiographical angle: Nathanson himself, who grew up Jewish and helped to found the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws to oppose restrictions on abortion, later became a pro-life activist. For more than 10 years after he became pro-life he described himself as a "Jewish atheist", but in 1996 he converted to Catholicism. So we can talk about a double conversion.

Some students of the Liceo Scientifico Cardano in Milan and their families complained to the school, and the religion teacher who showed the film was removed from his job.

The schoolgirls were 16–17, so the idea that the documentary was too shocking for them is not a good excuse. After all, pupils much younger than that, primary school children, are taught in school the "progressive" nature of homosexuality and onanism.

The real reason for the protest and sacking was that in our "post-Christian" society being against abortion is a much deadlier sin than abortion itself.

An ancient law of the sea says that, when at risk of shipwreck, women and children must be helped into the lifeboats first. This is what was done on the Titanic, in the most notorious shipwreck in history. On that famous ship the orchestra continued to play to buoy the courage of those who were doomed to drown, including the musicians themselves. And a Catholic priest gave confession and absolution to all those who asked for them, himself going down with the ship. Old-fashioned gentlemen?

Nope, Christians. Because the unwritten rule of «women and children first» dates back to when Christianity empowered the weak and commanded the strong to take care of them. Before then, it used to be the law of the jungle that applied, because not even the super-civilized Romans gave any weight to women and children.

Please take note, as you rummage in your historical and anthropological reminiscences: only in Christian civilization has there ever been the habit of treating women and children with kid gloves, so much so that even today, when anyone holds the door open for a lady, he is termed “chivalrous” [deriving from the French “chevalier”, or “knight”]. This is a reference to the “macho” warrior whom the Church had taught to defend the widow and the orphan, the poor man and the oppressed.

For example, when the much-praised Native Americans (once known as redskins) travelled, the squaw went on foot, laden down with the luggage and with her papoose on her back; the husband was up front, riding a horse.

Assuredly, many of the gentlemen who went down with the Titanic were not religious at all, and many were Freemasons and anti-papists. But they were born and raised in a culture that was nineteen centuries old, a culture that could hardly avoid calling itself Christian, as even liberal Benedetto Croce had to admit.

Now let's listen to soprano Dimitra Theodossiou, one of the passengers on the Italo-Greek ferry that went up in flames a few days ago: «I was beaten and dragged down, as they tried to pull me off the ladder. But I reacted vigorously. I said: 'It's our turn!'».

Her words were confirmed by many other female passengers who underwent the same treatment. The men in the helicopters did indeed try to embark the women, children and the elderly first. But among them «there were at least some fifty men (…) who, in order to take their places, beat them, pulled their hair and threw them out».

In this reported sentence, the phrase omitted and replaced by dots included: «mainly Turks, Iraqis and Pakistanis». One of the rescue pilots said: «In order to try to save the children, the women, the elderly and the wounded first, as we always do, I had to yell and threaten to go away in my helicopter and leave them all there, over and over again.»

«As we always do». Quite. But not in the places of origin of those who (in the words of a Greek truck driver aptly named Christos) «had no consideration for the women and children at all».

However, why should the protagonists of this act, which to us is simply disgraceful and cowardly, be ashamed of themselves or feel like vile human beings? In their “culture” (I place the word decidedly in inverted commas) the women and children don't count at all.

These men have on their shoulders fifteen centuries which have accustomed them to thinking in this way. Back when I was studying Political Science, there was still a subject called Comparative Cultural Anthropology. That was before political correctness and relativism rendered it useless, as the 1968 protesters spread the idea that the Sioux were better than the cowboys and that the English first, and all the other Westerners after them, needed to be taught everything by Hindu gurus.

Today, whoever dares say that our civilization, moulded by Christianity, is superior to all the others risks a jail sentence or at the very least a lynching in the media. Yet the very ideology of relativism has been possible only in a Christian environment, and politically correct thinking itself believes it is superior to all the others.

What ludicrous imbecility this is, however, was summed up best by one of the men shoving the women aside in order to take their places in the rescue seat: «Why, aren't we all supposed to be equal?». What he implied was that, now that women have achieved equality, they can no longer expect preferential treatment. But it just so happens that he was universally deprecated (by the ex-Christians [or post-Christians]).

There's nothing to do: the latest ideology in vogue (again, among the Westerners) is no match for a culture that has become rooted in consciences precisely because it is the closest to the project that the Creator had in mind. And those who try to save their skins by climbing into lifeboats in place of women and children still remain cowards and vile human beings.

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About Me

Philosophy graduate, journalist, website creator and
blogger born in Italy and living in London. I have been London correspondent for Italian media, including Panorama, L'Espresso, La
Repubblica. I translated Peter Singer's book Animal Liberation into Italian.